Wireless Local Area Network (Wireless LAN hereafter) is emerging as a highly-demanded and fast-deployed technology. With its relative high-throughput capability and lower deployment cost (no spectrum license fee required), wireless LAN has been considered as a complimentary technology with 3G mobile wireless network to provide seamless data service coverage. IEEE 802.11b operating at 11 Mb/s is the most widely-deployed technology among the wireless LAN technology family and has been adopted widely in academic and enterprise environments. Commercial service based on 802.11b is also available in major airports, train stations, hotels, malls, and coffee shops around the world. IEEE 802.11a operating in the 5 GHz spectrum and IEEE 802.11g operating in the 2.4 GHz spectrum, the high throughput versions of IEEE 802.11 family, are gradually being deployed to offer even better data throughput. Supporting wireless LAN connectivity has been considered as a mandatory feature for new end user mobile devices, particularly PDA and laptops. New technologies for such devices currently support 802.11b and will support 802.11a and 802.11g in the near future, to boost the demand of wireless connectivity, as well as equipment upgrades. Most new laptops are equipped with wireless LAN connectivity and the demand continues to grow. It has been reported that wireless access points may become as ubiquitous as telephone jacks. (Steve Weinstein, The Mobile Internet: Wireless LAN vs. 3G Cellular Mobile, IEEE Communications, February, 2002).
A significant problem with the use of WLAN by mobile users is that WLAN was originally designed for local area environments with simple password-backed encryption protection of over-the-air transmission. Therefore, in order to access a WLAN, the mobile device must be pre-configured manually with network profiles that contain mandatory access information, such as Network name or ESSID, and password. For mobile users connected to a geographically distributed network consisting of thousands of access points, the need to manually re-configure upon handoff from one access point to another, imposes a major impediment.
There remains a need in the art for improvements in configuration for mobile users in WLAN environments.